It Follows and Sleeping with People

Ten years ago, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. After a decade of rewatches, if It Follows is about anything, it’s about people who wanna get laid. Vibe prone, quiet, the basic plot is simple, but the film’s strength is its mournful ambiguity. Should the year the movie is set in feel like a secret? How much rests on Dostoyevsky’s prose? Why has no one made that clamshell e-reader? It Follows provides no tidy answers to these questions, but the film does offer a definitive throughline: sex. A film where sex and the monster are inseparable, to better know the Entity is to consider what sex means to It Follows.  

It Follows tells an ultra-efficient story. Main character Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a man who, by this act, passes her the murderous, supernatural Entity. The Entity can take any form, often a recognizable one, yet is invisible to others. The Entity follows its target until the target is dead then returns to following the person who passed it on. Jay attempts to come to grips with and defeat this Entity. The Entity is passed through what the film portrays as consensual intercourse. Jay’s first sexual encounter with Hugh (Jake Weary)—her contraction of the Entity—is all post-coital bliss until the chloroform comes out. Even when later quizzed by the cops, Jay reiterates the sex was consensual. 

This informs the widely held view that It Follows is about the consequences of sexual violence. Consent can change quickly. Victims are afraid or unwilling to tell police the truth. The man Jay slept with used her body to transmit violent death. Others read it more literally as a movie about STDs, yet the only remnants are multiple articles about how It Follows is not about STDs. Some felt the film reinforced the misguided notion that people inherit every sexual partner any given partner has had before them. One reviewer went so far as to call it an allegory for the dangers of casual and premarital sex. In all these scenarios, the film views sex as bad, if not a punishable act. For a movie so preoccupied with yearning, that idea doesn’t fit the arc of Jay’s—or It Follows—relationship with sex.

It Follows is an aching coming of age film where the characters crave sex that will kill them. The film doesn’t frame sex as evil, but persistent. It’s transformational. It’s often at odds with fantasies of love. After sex with Hugh, the Entity unknowingly passed to her, Jay coos about dreams of dates in cars with boys. Said from the backseat of a cute guy’s car, Jay’s fantasy sounds entirely removed from her near identical reality. In the very next scene, Jay meets the horror. Teen movie sensibilities of young love collide with slasher flick tropes. It’s not that the first couple to screw gets butchered. It’s that death is inevitable! But aching desire, intimacy’s burning touch, their thrills and fears and anxieties pressing against us, those are right now. Here, sex kills, but the longing gets you.      

A rejection of young love’s imagined innocence, the film’s melancholy cry seems to be that none of this comes without a cost. Sure, there’s a monster that kills people for banging bods, but the idea is also reinforced in the micro. In a tender scene between Jay and Paul (Keir Gilchrist), Jay recalls her first kiss, a kiss with Paul. His first kiss, too, Paul immediately crushed Jay by kissing another girl. Paul replies with a memory about their finding porno mags together. Spread across a friend’s front yard, laughing at the smut, they were caught and given the sex talk the next day. In It Follows, sex comes with consequences. Not in a scolding way, but a view of sex as a vulnerable place with a long memory. 

To really comprehend the sex in It Follows, there’s no more halting depiction than that of men still looking to fuck. They’ve seen the unexplainable. They’ve witnessed death. They want to smash. After Jay chooses to have sex with hunky Greg (Daniel Zovatto) over Paul, Paul is wounded that the murder hungry ghoul wasn’t passed to him. As a bit about boys’ terminal horniness, it works, but it captures the irrational power that sex can assert on human lives. 

The expressions of sex in It Follows are wide-ranging. Jay has sex three times. First is Jay’s dreamy date with Hugh which twists into her Entity nightmare. Next is the tryst with Greg, who eagerly takes the invitation as Jay joylessly stares into space. Finally, there is a tender, meaningful consummation with Paul. Beyond Jay, there’s the outright Freudian when the Entity, disguised to look like Greg’s mom, humps Greg to death in a mess of electric bolts and sticky white goo. Does Paul have sex with a sex worker to further pass on the Entity? The screenplay doesn’t explicitly say, but that’s the horrific implication. And where it’s not quite sex, the Entity variously appears nude, half nude, and as a tall guy. Not the most uplifting rundown, but it captures the wide variety of ways sex exists in the film.  

I’m loath to symbol search—and if Mitchell’s audacious, maligned follow-up Under the Silver Lake is any indication, dude loves a film to solve—but I can’t shake It Follows’ repeated references to the card game Old Maid. An encapsulation of the film’s tension, no one wants to be left with the last card. Is the last card the Entity? Or is the last card being without sex? Because an old maid, on its face, is a single, forgotten woman. For the characters of It Follows, the Entity seems manageable, but no one wants to be the one not getting any. 

In It Follows, sex is what cannot be escaped. In its many shapes, with its romantic myths and consequences, the characters can’t escape from something they want. The weight of Paul’s yearslong crush on Jay is ruled heavier than certain death. Where David Robert Mitchell largely side-stepped public interpretation of It Follows, he was consistent on one point, best articulated in a 2019 Fangoria Q&A, “…the characters basically open themselves up to danger through sex, but sex is also a way they are able to have some kind of temporary freedom—to push death away, at least for a while.” 

The Entity, sex, and death are bound by their appetites. As much as the Entity is a stand in for mortality, it embodies gnawing desire. Lurking, able to find you anywhere, it’s always aching for more. It’s the horror movie version of being so horny you’re scared. A profile of the kind of desire that leaves you folded into ruinous bits and washed up on shore. Because what does that kind of desire usually crave? One more person.

True to form, It Follows’ ending is ambiguous, but I like to think Jay and Paul are happy. Exploring their budding romance, making love without fear, they are fully aware the Entity is just over their shoulder. A monster made of sex and death; the film’s final thought isn’t one of defeat. It’s about how, and with whom, to confront the monster.